Pariah
Stopped On Track
Dark Horse
Alps
Where Do We Go Now?
Dragonslayer
Terri
The Natural Phenomenon of Madness
I'm Carolyn Parker
Beauty
The Monk
Mitsuko Delivers
Breathing
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Lawrence of Belgravia
This Must Be the Place
A Simple Life
The Future

But it's not as bad as David Gordon Green - I don't know if you (or anyone) saw his debut George Washington, which was a really stunning Malick-ish drama set in the Deep South, and he's wound up making dreck like Your Highness.

But yeah, oh for the days of City Of God. Can't believe that was nearly 10 years ago now. I feel old.

It says something for the warmth and believability of the central relationship (between Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character and Seth Rogan’s), that despite a lot of flaws, I though it was a lovely film.

The music was slapped on with a trowel and was intrusive, the girlfriend was a hopelessly two-dimensional character, the relationship with the therapist was unethical and unbelievable, and Levitt’s character suffered from ‘telegenic-cancer’. But, but, overriding all that was a funny, honest and heartfelt bromance that anchors the film with an emotional truth that is often lacking in both romantic comedies and ‘cancer movies’.

I also liked the fact that we had to walk down the red carpet into the cinema.

I thought that it started off quite wittily (in particular the date scene), but by the final third I just wasn't interested in the characters or what McQueen was doing. I just stopped caring.

Usually, as with music, I love films that are deliberately blank and emotionless, but only if that resulting void triggers something in myself. This time it didn't. Mulligan's character was a hackneyed mess of a cliche, and Fassbender's failed to distance itself from Patrick Bateman (albeit a Patrick Bateman with a taste for good jazz). Visually and thematically it was surprisingly conservative. Perhaps I was expecting too much and went in over-defensive, but nothing in the film surprised me apart from its agonisingly predictable dénouement.

which I found a little too stately and classical in it's approach, and the 3D added nothing to the experience. Having said that, it was a dutiful (perhaps too dutiful) look at the notion of honour in feudal Japan.

Thought it was a really impressive film, incredibly intense. I'm off to the LFF next Monday to see Martha Macy May Marlene, missed tickets for most of the films I was really excited for but I'm definitely looking forward to this one in any case.

Pariah - Run of a mill coming out story, saved by brilliant acting from its lead. 7/10

Stopped on Track - Excellent French film about a man's last months after finding out he has a brain tumour. Darkly funny in places, really deserved more than the tiny audience that was there for it. 8/10

Dark Horse - Started off well and I really wanted to like this so much but it was a mess. Soldonz has lost it, sadly. Also accompanied by Italian subtitles for some reason, really distracting. 5/10

The Artist was utterly wonderful. The most grin-inducing and flat-out enjoyable film I’ve seen in a long time. I manages to hit the perfect pitch between knowing dissection and genuine love for silent cinema. If it comes out in the UK, everyone should really try to go.

Also, Harvey Weinstein seemed really nervous beforehand, didn’t he? And didn’t he say that the director wasn’t there as he’d just had a baby? I thought that the director was married to the female lead in the film, who was up on stage. I dunno.

Have also enjoyed a bit of double Clooney action with The Ides of March and The Descendants in the last couple of days, especially the latter, which is strong, if not quite vintage Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways)

Tonally, The Decendants reminded me of Win Win, which kinda came and went this year but I really enjoyed it. After seeing so much challenging stuff, it's nice to have a character-based story with some juicy moral dilemmas you can get your teeth into. It's not a classic, but Clooney might well get an Oscar nom

Rediscovered Swedish footage of some incredible characters and moments in the US civil rights movement. Lacked a little coherence and the modern-day talking heads commentary was less inspiring, but that was pretty inevitable. The really interesting stuff – Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis interviewed in prison, Louis Farrakhan, the Black Power Bookshop – was breath-taking, spine-tingling stuff. Some real gems in there.

Strong contender for the bleakest films thread. Dramatisation of the Australian ‘bodies in the barrels’ serial killings. Probably made Australia look like the single grimmest place in the world, but genuinely chilling and moving. I have a strong stomach for movie violence, but thought some of the scenes were really pushing the boundaries of acceptability – there was really no need to see someone getting strangled to the point of death then released time and time and time again, especially when (and this is the important bit) the shot of someone witnessing it happen was far more affecting and gut-wrenching. With that one caveat, the script was great and some of the performances from first-time actors – the young lead especially – phenomenal.

Latest film from the Director of Dogtooth, which gives you a good idea what to expect if you’ve seen that. Exactly the same stilted dialogue and eerie unnatural scenarios which build up an overall atmosphere that’s never less than compelling no matter how banal the scene otherwise appears to be. Superb concept of damaged individuals taking it upon themselves to offer recently-bereaved families a surrogate loved one by acting out their habits and behaviour. So much great potential in that concept and thought there was probably a further 20% that could have been explored, but just as effective a black comedy as Dogtooth. Less shocking but, perhaps surprisingly, genuinely moving at times.

Documentary on the “real-life superheroes” fad in America (600-700 of them and counting apparently!). Nutjobs dressing up in ridiculous costumes to ‘fight evil’ + general difficulty of bumping into evil at random on any given street + complete lack of self-awareness + clever, sympathetic directing = one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen. Great documentary-making. Particularly liked that the harder and more serious superheroes seemed to get more and more absurd (i.e. cooking up childish entrapment ploys, trying to chase fleeing cars on their cool black skateboards), while those who seemed completely ridiculous at first turned out to have found genuinely useful ways to help society.

Great Mexican action thriller\socio-political commentary. By any rights, based on the set-up – beauty contestant witnesses gangland killing, goes on the run – it should have been awful, but it was so, so well done. The lead actress was outstanding – stunningly beautiful at times, gawky and petrified at others, but entirely believable throughout. Really gripping and stunningly shot. A number of the fight\chase scenes reminded me of Children of Men in terms of style. Similar in terms of being on the cusp of reality and allegory at times too. Brilliant revelation of an under-reported humanitarian disaster – 36,000 deaths related to drug-running gangs in Mexico in the last five years alone!?! Fortunately the Director’s mum isn’t going to get her wish for son to start making “fun movies like Will Smith” any time soon and he’s definitely one to watch.

Terrible, terrible Israeli film that made next to no sense. Awful acting, painfully bad dialogue, incoherent plot, irredeemably unsympathetic characters and very little insight into a really fascinating society. Aspired, I presume, to be a kind of Babel revealing the divisions in Israeli society. Talking about it afterwards, there were just so many points where it appeared you were being shown something deep and meaningful, but which turned out to literally have no point. I have a really high tolerance for pretentious art, but this was just plain old-fashioned bad art instead.

Why did the policeman break into the maternity ward to look at babies? Why did his friend with cancer keep turning up to hug him at inappropriate moments (i.e. in the middle of a terrorist raid he was meant to be combatting)? Why did he hit on a 15 year-old girl for no reason? Why did the lead girl terrorist get hit on by a stream of men and women in a club – was that a dream sequence? Why did people keep dancing around naked or rolling on the floor grappling? Are all Israelis really so fucking humourless? The few interesting ideas in the plot went completely unexplored in favour of melodrama or gaping non-sequiturs.

Genuinely have no idea how it got selected for the Festival. Highlight was when the projectionist fell asleep and we had ninety seconds of darkness and silence.

and Superheroes and Miss Bala really stand out. I'm still processing my thoughts about Alps, and Snowtown, well... you picked up on it in what you wrote, but as well-made and acted as it was, I thought it was actually a pretty disgusting film, more interested in depiction than investigation. I couldn't recommend it.

Seems like we agree on about 90% of what we've both seen. Good read by the way, and not just because of that agreement.

I completely understand your point about Snowtown - can't imagine recommending it to anyone else to go see either. Whether its unremitting bleakness makes it a less good film though is a massive question to answer.

As you say, it does solely depict rather than investigate, which would be better, but I still think there is a place for that in film. It's difficult to express, but I think art can have a cathartic element that can be quite two-dimensional: from Greek tragedies to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sometimes the impact can be little more than "terrible things happen in the world and I ought to be grateful they're not happening to me". There certainly wasn't any great social lesson to be learnt from Snowtown, but you could still argue that a true-to-life story is more worthwhile than out-and-out torture porn like Wolf Creek, which I remembering finding pretty odious. That's covering a lot of philosophical ground in a pretty superficial way, but those are interesting questions and would need a dissertation or a book to explore them properly.

It's a subject I plan to go into in much more detail, because there's definitely something going on with violence in more ostensibly mainstream films at the moment what with Drive and Kill List for example.

As you say, there is an argument that Snowtown is preferable to out and out torture porn, but equally there is something distasteful about a film that presents itself as arthouse drama and recourses to similar tactics; that one scene in the bathtub for example is one of the most morally abject I've ever sat through. And I hated the way that they camera kept implicating the viewer by doing these slow reveals to appalling acts.

A similar film is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Makes you feel like you need a hot shower afterwards.

Way too much to go into in a little round-up though!

P.S. Have you seen a film called One False Move? (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102592/) There's a scene right near the start that is as bad, if not worse, than anything in Snowtown, but it goes on to explore loads of really interesting themes. It just popped into my head and is a really underrated film.

The inflation of violence in films is something I've been wondering about for a while. I'm instinctively against censorship in all but the most extreme situations, but sooner or later there has to be a line drawn - it's such a cheap way to add shock value to even the most mediocre films. I'll be very happy never to see someone have their eyes gouged out in films for example - something I've seen far too much of of late.

but it's the system that doesn't make sense. Essentially it's a film for adults with lots of really adult content, but the NC-17, unlike an 18 over here, is tantamount to box office death because it restricts marketing and advertising opportunities, and is like a puritanical blacklist. Having said that, it looks like Fox Searchlight are going to wear it as a badge of honour instead of fighting it, and will use the quality and seriousness of the film to try and change the perception of NC-17s.

But as you say its utterly insane that stuff like Wolf Creek, Hostel and Saw gets away with an R-rating.

I also saw Sleeping Sickness, a strange German film set in Cameroon, about a doctor working with cases of 'sleeping sickness'. It swaps it's main character for another one midway through the film. Very disorientating.

Also saw Elena by Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russian director of The Return and The Banishment. It's about a wife who gets caught between her rich husband and her lazy son. Feels a bit like a biblical parable. Not up to the standards of The Return, but pretty compelling nonetheless.